Guillaume Moinard

Hi folks, and welcome! 🦊

After completing a PhD in computer science at Sorbonne University, under the supervision of Matthieu Latapy with the Complex Networks team, I now pursue a carreer dedicated to network science, social movements, and all sorts of ideas!

Hold on! “Social movements” and “Science”? What’s the catch?

Well, there is a link! Many actually!

1. Protests as a Gathering Problem

During my PhD, my main interest was an interdisciplinary one: I studied events such as protests or demonstrations as a computer science problem.

Imagine a group of people, scattered over a city. How can they meet? Coordinating, by exchanging their positions thanks to modern means of communication, seems easy. But how to achieve the same result if communications are impossible and no meeting point is identifiable? This is the case, for example, during a repressed social movement or a blackout.

The objective of my thesis was to find the key ingredients for a movement tactic to ensure that walkers meet in the same place, regardless of their starting positions. I modeled a city as a street network, a graph, and protesters as biased random walkers. I then identified what the best walking rules are for effective gatherings in such context.

2. Money by and for the people ?

I am now a postdoctoral researcher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. I focus on a new topic: can citizens create and manage a digital currency, without a centralized institution and without creating significant inequalities, such as those observed for most cryptocurrencies?

Within the Digital Currency Ecosystems research group, I study governance within a decentralized economy: the Ğ1 currency. Among other things, I explore how distributed this ecosystem actually is and whether the web of trust, a decentralized identification system, efficiently prevents fraud without preventing newcomers from joining this economic network.